EXCLUSIVE'It's a blood bath': Inside the White House blame game as backstabbing staffers and score-settling pundits rock a Democratic Party in crisis

By EMILY GOODIN, SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT and NIKKI SCHWAB, CHIEF CAMPAIGN CORRESPONDENT

PUBLISHED: 06:20 GMT, 16 November 2024 | UPDATED: 08:34 GMT, 16 November 2024

As the results started to pour in on Tuesday night last week, an optimistic mood in Kamala Harris's team quickly dimmed.

With the writing on the wall, Harris herself went to bed, refusing to concede defeat to Donald Trump until the following afternoon. By then, a Democratic blame game was already in full force.

'It's a blood bath,' one observer noted of the rabid infighting – with no one spared humiliation.

President Biden and VP Harris broke bread on Tuesday when they lunched together for the first time in months. But there are no signs that the private time in the small dining room off the Oval Office has healed the hard feelings between the two sides.

Harris's most loyal aides are putting her loss squarely on President Joe Biden – for his poor record on inflation and immigration, for his many verbal fumbles and, most importantly, for refusing to drop out of the race sooner.

Some insiders described the president as an '81-year-old albatross hanging around Harris's neck.'

On Friday last week, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – who is widely believed to have helped force Biden to step down – went a step further, brutally telling the New York Times: 'Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race… there would be an open primary.'

The suggestion: A properly competitive race would have allowed a stronger candidate than Harris to emerge as nominee.

But Team Biden isn't taking this lying down.

In fact, as he addressed Harris's defeat in a speech from the White House Rose Garden on Thursday last week, many present pointed out that he appeared to be enjoying himself.

One White House insider was keen to suggest that – given the size of Trump's victory – there was no way Harris would have been able to pull together a win, even if she'd had more time to campaign.

Meanwhile, Biden loyalists are now at pains to remind people that he is the only person to have successfully defeated Donald Trump in an election – and that, before this summer, Harris ranked as the most unpopular vice president in history.

The president and First Lady Jill Biden did not join Harris's official election watch party on the night itself.

Certainly, there have long been rumors of tension between Jill and Harris.

Most memorably, when Harris made her first bid for the presidency back in the 2020 race, Jill reportedly raged that Harris should 'go f***' herself after she'd accused Joe Biden of racism during a televised Democratic primary debate.

Cut forward to 2024, and Jill has been a regular presence on the Harris campaign trial.

At a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery this week, however, Jill appeared to give Harris the cold shoulder. Hiding her eyes behind dark glasses, Jill stared fixedly ahead throughout the ceremony, despite sitting next to the vice president.

Harris's inability to separate herself from the Biden Administration proved to be a problem. As was her choice of running mate.

The day after the election last week, Democratic insider, Paul Strauss, told DailyMail.com that Josh Shapiro — the hugely popular governor of the essential swing state of Pennsylvania — would have been a better choice for VP nominee.

'I was in Pennsylvania and I saw the writing on the wall there. I was wishing we would have picked Shapiro. That would have been 19 [electoral] votes,' Strauss said.

Though, he conceded, that the Harris campaign had other issues, including the prioritization of celebrity-filled rallies over basic voter mobilization strategies.

'In the end, [the VP pick] wouldn't have necessarily made the difference,' Strauss concluded. 'I remember being at these rallies in Philadelphia, these concerts, and it's the day before election and I'm thinking to myself, "Why the hell are we listening to a third Lady Gaga song after midnight? We should get these people into bed... we need to get everybody up at 7:00 in the morning.'

And then there's the problem of Harris's management skills.

'[Staff] feel lied to by the campaign,' one Democratic official told Reuters last week, adding that they'd received a flurry of angry texts on Tuesday evening after damning exit poll data showed Trump gaining ground among demographics that Harris was supposed to have relied on.

'How do you lose a campaign this badly?' another Dem strategist said. 'For weeks, they told us this campaign would be tight. And really, it wasn't even close.'

Some have described the defeat as a re-run of Harris's disastrous first presidential bid – which she was forced to drop even before the first round of primary votes was held.

Back then, Harris's sister Maya came up for criticism.

Despite having worked on Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 campaign, Maya was swiftly elevated to the very top of Harris's team.

Maya had been 'involved in virtually every facet of the race', a report in Politico said at the time.

Another article, published by the usually sympathetic New York Times, went so far as to say that Maya went 'unchallenged', while Harris seemed unable or unwilling to take control.

In the aftermath of Harris's botched 2020 campaign, the sisters were accused of presiding over a 'toxic' workplace in which staff 'felt they weren't valued.'

In a sensational resignation letter, again published in the New York Times, senior campaign staffer Kelly Mehlenbacher wrote: 'I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly.'

This time around, as the Mail reported last month, it is understood that while Maya wasn't offered an official campaign title, she remained close to her sister.

Maya's husband Tony West, senior vice president of Uber, even took extended leave from work in August, telling staff in an internal email that he would be concentrating on 'supporting my family and my sister-in-law on the campaign trial.'

West, however, has come under the same criticism Maya Harris did.

Aides feared his deep involvement with the campaign along with being a close family member created competing priorities, as it did four years ago.

Another prominent figure who has come up for criticism is Harris's Pennsylvania campaign manager, Nikki Lu.

Last month, alarm bells were already ringing when insiders said that the campaign's strategy for the state was 'such a mess.'

They said Lu had been 'AWOL' and had '[empowered] a culture' within the campaign that left subordinates feeling ignored and disrespected.

Of course, the postmortem will be long and comprehensive. Even Barack Obama is shouldering some of the blame.

'There is no singular reason why we lost, but a big reason is because [former] Obama advisers publicly encouraged Democratic infighting to push Joe Biden out,' one former Biden staffer said last week in a reference to David Axelrod, Obama's White House guru who became increasingly critical of Biden this summer.

Obama appears to have been the root of other problems, too.

After Biden finally pulled out in July, Harris had to build a campaign team in record time. Many of those she turned to were former Obama staffers. Others were handovers from the Biden campaign.

However, reports soon emerged that this was an unhappy marriage – with the two sides regularly warring over strategy decisions.

As that same former Biden staffer put it: '[Obama's staffers were] signed up as the saviors of the campaign only to run outdated Obama-era playbooks for a candidate that wasn't Obama.'

In the end, no matter who ends up with the blame, the Democratic Party will have to move on to survive.

A new generation of ambitious Democrats are already said to be plotting their 2028 campaigns – governors such as California's Gavin Newsom, Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer and Maryland's Wes Moore.

If they are sensible, they'll find their own experienced campaign staff and prepare a clear strategy that delineates itself from the Biden-Harris catastrophe.

If they aren't, they'll need to be ready to point the blame elsewhere.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5635153&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310477",#48344572)

In the aftermath of Harris's botched 2020 campaign, the sisters were accused of presiding over a 'toxic' workplace in which staff 'felt they weren't valued.'

In a sensational resignation letter, again published in the New York Times, senior campaign staffer Kelly Mehlenbacher wrote: 'I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly.'

Another prominent figure who has come up for criticism is Harris's Pennsylvania campaign manager, Nikki Lu.

Last month, alarm bells were already ringing when insiders said that the campaign's strategy for the state was 'such a mess.'

They said Lu had been 'AWOL' and had '[empowered] a culture' within the campaign that left subordinates feeling ignored and disrespected.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5635153&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310477",#48344646)